We arrived in Magadan … at last:

Checked into a hotel and made our way down to the bay:

That evening we had dinner with Ilya (our main contact in Magadan) and Prokhor in the Green Crocodile pub. Tony and I had drank with Ilya and Prokhor in the same place last year.

Ilya showed me some of his photos of 4WD expeditions around the Road of Bones and its side roads. One of his expeditions had some fotos of Rayil … our friend and the head of the 4WD club in Yakutsk.

The bikes still hadnt arrived by the morning of the 28th July, so Ilya took me out to an ocean fishing beach near Ola, 40km East of Magadan.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Nets were full of huge salmon, and apparently this isnt even a good year.

You need a licence to fish in the sea in Russia, and the licences cost 100 rubles per day, plus 46 roubles per fish. A pretty small sum when you saw how mush Salmon was on hand. This guy had 2 huge bags filled with salmon in the back of his 4WD … probably 10 salmon per bag. I asked him how long he had fished to get this huge haul. “About 30 minutes” he replied.

As the salmon flayed in the nets, seals began appearing … to try and steal some:

And where there are seals, there are those that hunt the seals. About 50 yards offshore, the Killer Whales were feasting!

The next morning (July 29) we were down on the dock … the bikes had been on desk, and so were going to have a bit of rust on them. But for 4000 rubles, we weren’t complaining. The bikes were offloaded, and Sherri watched on nervously.

So now we had the bikes free in Magadan. It was time to begin the ride. And about time too!

. . .

29.07.10 … 4pm

We pulled out of Magadan, but not before a return run to the fishing beach. I had told Sherri Jo about the seals and killer whales, and she wanted a piece of that action. Sadly while the day before there had been hundreds of seals poaching away, today there were barely a few, and no killer whales. All I could see was fishermen hauling in their nets.

We stopped to pay our respects at the Mask of Sorrows, the monument to the estimated 700,000+ who died in Stalin’s Kolyma Gulags.

We saw a Trekol, a very cool, hard core Russian recreational vehicle. One of these 6WD babies will set you back over USD 40,000.

Before long we were out of Magadan and on the open road. The start of the Road of Bones. The first 180 km heading north is paved and we made good time. About 50km short of Atka the asphalt stops and this was the first chance I had to see what my riding companion for the next 3 weeks or so is like in the dirt. First impressions were that Sherri Jo will be fine. She listens to advice, has good basic technique and her initial speed of 50 km/h (30 mph) on dirt roads is mainly due to inexperience on this kind of road. I told her she will be comfortable at 100 km/h (62 mph) on dirt by the time we reach Irkutsk.

We reached Atka, our first refuelling stop and filled up. A landcruiser pulled up and an Aussie geologist and his entourage stepped out. He warned us about bears. Apparently it’s a big year for bears this year. We took that on board and went down the road to the café for some dinner.

We had left Magadan at 4 in the afternoon. Daylight would last till 11pm. It was 9:15pm by the time we finished dinner and hit the road north. 11pm should take us to an abandoned town called Myakit. There was nothing before Myakit, nothing after it for another 150km and there were no hotels where we were in Atka … camping was dodgy, considering we had just been warned about bears. One thing was in our favour … there were a lot of wild bushfires in the area and the air was thick with smoke. Bears dont like smoke.

So why were we heading for Myakit, Sherri Jo wondered … Well it wasn’t completely abandoned. About 10 people still lived there. And I had a contact in Magadan who knew them all.

We rode through the diminishing light and just before 10:30 pm we arrived. The town must have been something once. Apparently 5000 people once lived there. It was hard to see any signs of life, but eventually we spotted them and rode over. After introducing them and bringing personal greetings from our contact in Magadan, we were welcomed with open arms. Everyone was sitting around a table eating their evening meal, having a few vodkas and chatting. We were immediately made some fish soup, tea and made to feel at home. One guy gave us his home for the night and said he would sleep in one of the other homes. It was a nice welcome to rural Russian hospitality. We eventually went to sleep about 1am.